With the book done, I returned once again to the overwhelming foreign policy issue of the time—Vietnam. The war had become a virtual bloodbath for both sides by late 1967, and the growing antiwar movement was desperate to find a way to block the reelection in 1968 of Lyndon Johnson. One fantasy had it that Senator Robert Kennedy of New York would break with his party and run on an antiwar platform against the President in Democratic primaries across America. There was no sign, however, that Kennedy was prepared to take the political risk of doing so. Thus the “Dump Johnson” movement, led by Allard Lowenstein, who also had been in the forefront of the civil rights movement, was in desperate search of a candidate in late 1967, and he was not having much luck.
My wife and I, in need of more space, had rented a small house in northwest Washington that had two immediate attractions: It was a few dozen yards from the entrance to the official residence of the Indian ambassador, and Mary McGrory lived across the street. India was a close ally of Russia’s in the ongoing Cold War and also maintained embassies in Hanoi and Beijing, and its senior diplomats were, by necessity, well informed on America’s progress, or lack thereof, in the Vietnam War.* Mary, then a must-read columnist for the Washington Evening Star, had emerged as a fearless and moral voice against the Vietnam War. She liked the reporting I had done from the Pentagon while at the Associated Press, and, equally as important, she was a good neighbor. She brought dinner many times to us after the birth of our son, and got a martini or two from me in return. One evening she told me that Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, a Democrat from Minnesota who had been raising questions about the war, was going to jump into the race against Johnson. Mary had been close to President Kennedy and was disappointed because Bobby wouldn’t run. Gene was brilliant, but prickly, she said, and would need help with the press and with speeches. Did I want the job?
I didn’t know the senator and knew less than nothing about running a press operation for a presidential candidate. Mary urged me to meet McCarthy and said she would vouch for me and set things up. I had a brief chat with McCarthy the next day at his office in the Senate. It was clear he knew little, if anything, about me, but after some laconic back-and-forth he said I would do and ended the interview. The only word for him was “diffident,” and the only word for me at that point was “nonplussed.” McCarthy’s cavalier attitude toward me made it clear that he wasn’t very interested in a competent, or even halfway-competent, press operation. I had worked closely on CBW issues with the staffs of two liberal Democratic senators from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson and William Proxmire, and knew that the senators took their relationship with the media very seriously. I reported back to Mary McGrory, who told me not to fret and urged me to arrange a meeting with Blair Clark, the former head of CBS News who was going to be—this was all hush-hush—the campaign manager. I had no idea how to reach Clark, a New Yorker listed in the social register, but I did know his son Timothy, who was a reporter in Washington. We had played golf together, and I told him I was interested in being the press secretary. He called his father, who called me. We arranged a meeting at a Washington hotel, to which I brought a satchelful of clips. Blair, like McCarthy, wasn’t very interested in my writing, but he, too, pronounced me hired—“if we can get an okay.” The okay had to come from Abigail McCarthy, the senator’s wife, who, so I would learn, was doing everything possible to micromanage the campaign through Blair and, of course, through her husband. Mrs. McCarthy was very Catholic, very bright—a Phi Beta Kappa who did graduate work at the University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago—a stay-at-home mom, and totally invested in her husband’s career. It was a lethal combination.
McGrory understood that McCarthy’s campaign would be crazed and threw me to the wolves in the hope that I could do some good. I could care less what the senator’s wife thought, and I felt there were two valid reasons to take the job: No other Democrat seemed interested in challenging the seemingly assured nomination of Lyndon Johnson, and anything in public life was better than being yet another freelance journalist. So I signed up as the campaign’s press secretary at the princely sum of one thousand dollars a month. I then learned that most of McCarthy’s Senate aides, including Jerome Eller, his longtime chief of staff, the secretaries, and other minions in his office, wanted nothing to do with the campaign staff. I met with Blair in late November 1967, the day McCarthy announced his candidacy in New Hampshire. There was a stunning lack of interest in the announcement because McGrory, after a chat with McCarthy, had revealed in her column the day before that he was going to run. I probably should have made a run for the hills then, but was told, since I had accepted the job, that my first task was to fly to New York with the now-presidential candidate, who was scheduled to make a speech before an antiwar group.
McCarthy delivered his talk off the top, with no text, and it was riveting. He was challenging the post–World War II assumptions about the inherent power of the President to interfere militarily where he thought fit, and raised an issue that remains relevant today by insisting that the office belonged not to the man who holds it but “to the people of the nation.” We had a senior senator who was a ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee attacking a president from the same party over his unilateral decision to prosecute a murderous war. McCarthy went on to depict the war as immoral, something I never thought I’d hear a politician say. The guy knew his history and had guts, brains, and integrity. He also spoke quietly, with total self-assurance and implicit respect for the intelligence of his audience. He did not hector. My ambivalence evaporated. I had made the right choice.
It was going to be one hell of a job. My appointment had been reported in a brief two-paragraph story in the Times. Soon afterward a reporter named Jack Cole, who worked for the leading newspaper in Minneapolis, called me on the day of McCarthy’s speech and asked me to arrange an interview with him. I was now a real press secretary. I found Jerry Eller, who also had made the trip to New York, and told him of the request. I’ll never forget his answer: “Well, I’ll tell you what you do. Wait until you get two hundred requests and then throw them over the wall to me. We’ll handle them.” I felt it was a make-or-break moment for me in the job, so I shoved my way to McCarthy, who was surrounded by a cluster of adoring fans, grabbed him by the shoulder, told him about the request, and asked when the best time was to schedule the interview. We worked it out. I was at war with Eller, the senator’s staff, and his wife after that, but it was a war of necessity. McCarthy might have been Eller’s man in the Senate office, but he was mine, in a very limited sense, when we were on the road campaigning.
A few days later the senator and I flew to California, a focal point for antiwar fervor. On the flight out I gave him copies of a few recent books critical of the war, with various chapters and pages highlighted. I also gave him some data about local issues that I thought he could use in a speech he was scheduled to give at UCLA. The idea of writing a speech in advance for distribution to the wire services and local press had not penetrated the campaign, but it was a goal. I saw that McCarthy, like many senators, was a quick study. He raced through the packet of materials I gave him, which included critical essays about the war and a long memo on the constitutional issues raised by the pending trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock, everyone’s favorite pediatrician, and four others who were accused of conspiring to counsel young men to avoid the draft. We talked about the memo, which had been prepared by Michael Tigar, a brilliant Washington lawyer. I worried that perhaps McCarthy had gone through the materials too quickly. After his talk, though, before an enthusiastic crowd that filled more than half of the UCLA basketball stadium, he answered a question dealing with the Spock trial with a brilliant attack on the indictment, based on the Tigar analysis, and a defense of antiwar protests. His support for Spock made the national news that evening.
The contrast between the brilliance of the man and the chaos created by his Senate office was numbing. McCarthy rarely came to the downtown campaign office, and often I would go nuts because his Senate staff would not put me through to him when I called. I would then have to grab a taxi and race to the Senate to get an audience. But he was mine, so I thought, when we were on campaign trips. In those early days, I often was the only aide who accompanied him, and I was a busy bee, constantly giving him materials to read and keeping him up to date on the war and other issues. My diligence and hustle surely bemused him at first, but he soon came to expect a packet of materials from me before every important campaign stop. My travels were made possible by serendipity, in the name of a bright, fast-talking twenty-three-year-old blond ex-UPI reporter named Marylouise Oates, who had been hired by Allard Lowenstein to be Abigail’s press secretary. Oates spent a few days on the job before announcing to me that she was quitting after hearing Mrs. McCarthy express concern about all the “Hebrews” working for her husband. I thought that anyone who could figure out the downside of the candidate’s wife that quickly was worth keeping around, and I hired her as my deputy. I also sensed that the senator could not care less about my religious background.
Oates ran the Washington office, did all the hiring, and watched my back for the next three months. But that was the least of it. She had been associated for years as a campus activist with the National Student Association, a confederation of college and university governments whose members totaled in the millions, and she understood the potential and the necessity for organizing students across America to canvass for McCarthy to end the war. She introduced me to Sam Brown and David Mixner, who would mobilize a massive “Get clean for Gene” campaign—a slogan Oates thought up—that put many thousands of college students, with beards shaved off and ponytails gone, at work knocking on doors across America. Mixner and Brown would go on in subsequent years to organize massive antiwar campaigns that attracted hundreds of thousands to Washington.
The campaign had an excellent speechwriter, Peter Barnes, who later went to work for Newsweek, and I and a few of the volunteers whom Oates had recruited would add our thoughts to Peter’s drafts and get them to McCarthy in the hope that he would be interested enough to make them better. It was an imperfect system because the senator was brilliant at speaking on the fly, with no text, and he was also brilliant when he took time to review a draft, which he always improved. On those few occasions when he did so, we would have an advance text of speeches for distribution to the press, and better media coverage.
I knew my place and understood that McCarthy was a terrific second-guesser. I was constantly drafting short statements for the media about issues in the news, many of them about the Vietnam War, and they were invariably critical of the President. I was careful to get his approval in advance. Most were ignored, but there were occasions when McCarthy would be accused of going too far in his criticism of a president in wartime. The underlying inference was that he was aiding and abetting the enemy. On such occasions, especially in the presence of others, he would tear into me and ask how I could write such thoughtless tripe. I would just take it. I was sure McCarthy liked me—that is, my willingness to work hard and keep him up to date on important new books and magazine articles, along with what was in the newspapers. I also realized how taxing it was to make six, seven, or more speeches a day and constantly be on guard against a gaffe that could damage the campaign and even knock him out of the race. I understood why he was so disdainful of the media, which initially treated his campaign as one of whimsy, but I couldn’t fathom why, when there was an important speech to be made, he did not always insist on finding time to sit down with a speechwriter and outside experts to actually discuss what he wanted to say, or in other ways be proactive in terms of making public statements or giving interviews to those reporters he trusted. Did he really want to be President?
Early in the campaign, after a long, exhausting week of McCarthy shaking hands and making the same talk over and over again, I was called on a quiet Saturday afternoon in Manchester, New Hampshire, by a producer for Meet the Press, the most popular Sunday morning television interview show, and told there had been a last-minute cancellation. Would McCarthy fly to Washington and be the guest? He resisted, insisting he was just too tired. Of course he had to go. So I assured him I would cancel everything we had scheduled for the day afterward if he did the show. He had to know I was lying, but off we went. I did not cancel, and there was hell to pay. The ultimate truth, which he knew, was that Marylouise Oates and I and the thousands of college students ringing doorbells were not essentially working for him but rather to end the war. He had won us over with his brilliant speeches and the courage to do what Bobby Kennedy was too fearful to do. The senator, however, viewed our respect and admiration for him as an unwanted obligation. I had to beg him to spend time with the volunteers, and he often failed to do so.
On the other hand, there was a night in San Francisco early in the campaign when Jerry Brown, the son of former California governor Pat Brown, came for a visit. Young Brown was a devout Catholic who had studied in a Jesuit cloister, as did McCarthy, a Benedictine (who insisted that his religious views be separate from the campaign), and the two of them began talking about marijuana. Neither had ever smoked a joint, and there was no secret that some of the college-age volunteers who worked for me in the press operation were tokers. What was it all about? they asked. It took me only a few moments to produce a few joints, and the two of them got high, or tried to, for the first time. The stuff did little for McCarthy, so he said, but it did much more for Brown. On another night in San Francisco, after a long round of speeches and meetings, I watched as an exhausted McCarthy revived over drinks with one of his pals from his religious study days in Minnesota, an up-and-coming priest who would eventually become a bishop. I was sent out at some point to the City Lights bookstore in North Beach for a book of poetry, and another bottle of scotch, and as the night wore on, the talk turned from poetry to the Old Testament. The two of them began reading portions of the ancient text aloud to each other, amid much laughter and comments like “Would you believe this one, Gene?” It was fun to watch, and learn, as the two Bible experts went at it.
The nation’s first presidential primary, in New Hampshire, was approaching. After some hesitation, President Johnson, worried about his fading popularity, decided to run in the primary as a write-in candidate, and McCarthy’s fate, and perhaps the fate of the antiwar movement, would be decided on March 12, election day. The senator worked a hell of a lot harder than even his good friends thought he would. A typical campaign day would begin in Washington before five o’clock in the morning. McCarthy, who lived near our home, would drive over to fetch me, sometimes dashing in for scrambled eggs and a chat with my wife (he was always more interested in women), and we’d fly off to campaign, hoping to shake the hands of factory workers in Manchester as they began their morning shift.
It was very slow going at first. McCarthy had little visibility, as the polls throughout January and early February made clear. But we picked up support from Paul Newman and Robert Ryan, two movie stars who shared our worries about the war and who were willing to do anything they could, no matter how taxing, to help our fledgling campaign. Newman’s commitment was immense: He spent day after day making speeches at odd places throughout New Hampshire and afterward would meet with me or Marylouise Oates, who had moved there with our media staff, to discuss questions to which he thought he did not have a good enough answer. He wanted to learn. Ryan was full of surprising information. Over lunch one day, he watched me slather ketchup on a rushed hamburger and fries and asked me where in Chicago I had grown up. How did he know? He told me his father had been a union organizer in that union-dominated city and my use of ketchup made the guess a good bet. Robert Lowell, America’s most brilliant poet, also joined the campaign. His affinity with the candidate was obvious: Not only was McCarthy attacking the Vietnam War, which Lowell hated, but he was a poet at heart. McCarthy would bemuse and frustrate me by reading poems by intellectuals such as George Seferis, among others, instead of the briefing books on local issues I and my staff were constantly shoving at him.
The senator was doing six or more campaign speeches and appearances a day, at high schools, at colleges, and in front of church groups, and he enjoyed Lowell’s company in between. So did I. The three of us, with a driver, would flow from event to event sipping chilled vodka or some other alcohol from a thermos, and the candidate and the poet would happily trade joyous barbs and insights as I vainly tried to get McCarthy to focus on the next event. At one point, a highway billboard popped up with a photo of Nixon—then a candidate for the Republican nomination—and a slogan saying, “Nixon’s the one.” McCarthy insisted that the two of them could do better, and within three or four seconds, so it seemed, Cal, as Lowell asked to be called, said, “Nixon’s at ease with efficiency.”
Writing about it now, I’m not sure why the phrase seemed so impressive, but at the time it hit like a first-round knockout, and McCarthy spent a good hour sulking. Lowell had beaten him to the punch. Cal and I and the volunteer driver (what a story he could share later) dared not glance at each other for fear of laughing. I liked Cal and I’m sure he liked the fact that I knew nothing about poetry and never asked about his chaotic personal life. He spent hours yakking with me about my life—never his—during the seemingly unending McCarthy campaign events, where we sat out of sight. He wanted to know what I learned covering the Pentagon, and at one point he happily informed me, after a call from his then wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, an editor at The New York Review of Books, that the magazine had bought the serialization rights to my CBW book and would imminently publish two long excerpts from it.
McCarthy was a man of constant mood swings, best understood by his daughter Mary, the one member of the family who openly supported the campaign and endorsed its antiwar purpose. She was a student at Radcliffe and traveled with us on weekends. I would try hard to find her before presenting her father with a speech draft or a list of journalists who sought interviews. One morning, when my requests were especially fractious, I asked Mary how her father was feeling. Her answer still makes me laugh: “Alienated, as usual.”
McCarthy, when irritated, often took off on me, telling me again and again that my job was not “to get the press to like you, but to like me. Everybody thinks you’re great. You’ve got reporters sleeping in my bed, and riding in the back of my car.” He seemed to save his harshest indictments until he had an audience that included stars like Lowell or some of his big campaign contributors. I remember one night in which he learned at the end of a long day that I had issued a statement in his name—he had approved the gist of it—in which I quoted him as saying, “I believe.” He repeated the phrase again and again, adding, “Everyone knows I don’t say those words.” Of course he did, but at such moments I was glad for the tough love my father had put me through. I was certainly intimidated by McCarthy and eager to please, but not as much as others were.
There was an occasion, late in the campaign, when I was sure I had crossed a threshold and would be thrown out of work. We were flying on a commercial flight from Washington to Manchester when the pilot approached me to say that George Romney, the moderate Republican governor of Michigan, had just announced he was withdrawing as a presidential candidate. The pilot added that a pressroom had been set aside because there was a huge crowd of journalists waiting at the airport for us. Romney had been mocked incessantly by the media after a visit to South Vietnam when he claimed that he had been “brainwashed” by the briefings he’d received. His withdrawal was a huge break for us; primary rules in New Hampshire permitted independents and unregistered voters to vote for any candidate they chose, regardless of party affiliation, and our polling showed that we were certain to pick up many Romney votes. I told the senator about the withdrawal and wrote him a memo, with statistics from our polling, about the Republican votes that suddenly were there for the taking. I urged him to praise Romney for his great effort and talk about his love of public service. It was complete boilerplate and for sure was unnecessary—McCarthy did not need me to tell him how to win votes. But so what? This was a big deal. The senator read the few pages I wrote and then—as I watched in horror—slowly began tearing them up, with one long strip following another. Trouble was coming; I had told him what to think.
We landed and found a horde of reporters who, ignoring the pressroom, rushed instead to meet our plane on the tarmac. Aircraft in those days landed in front of the terminal, and passengers walked inside. McCarthy was the first off, with me following. Television network correspondents were there, along with more members of the national press corps than we had ever seen. What came next was utter perversion. When all quieted down, he opened his comments by saying—this was in front of a flood of cameras and microphones—that when it came to a question of the brainwashing of Romney, “just a light rinse would do.” It took a moment or two for some in the crowd to get it and as laughter was breaking out, I jumped in front of McCarthy waving my arms and said something like “C’mon, guys, we’re not having a press conference here.” I may have added a line about passengers waiting to get off the plane, but whatever I said worked. The network crews broke down their equipment, and we were all moved to a room inside the terminal. I could not believe the tough national press corps would let a punk like me push them around, but they did.
That night, as I watched in panic, none of the networks used the line about Romney. The one major newspaper that used the quote, and had fun with it, as far as I could tell, was London’s Sunday Times, whose first-rate Insight investigative team was in America to cover the primary. I was amazed and felt as if I’d protected McCarthy from his own peevishness. He said nothing to me about the event, but he knew I had protected him—from himself. I had a lousy job, so I thought, because I had loved the brilliance of the line—the man was very funny—but his job at that moment was to do everything possible to win the votes of those in New Hampshire who were supporting Romney. The senator had to know that there was no halfway when it came to running for the presidency, and ending a war.
A few days later, during yet another plane ride in which he began gossiping about the Senate, I got the courage to ask about some of his pals who were hanging around the campaign. I knew by sheer coincidence that one of them, Tom McCoy, had been the CIA chief of station in Laos; a neighbor of ours, a local artist, had served under him there. It was hard to dislike McCoy; he was rarely serious and loved playing word games about who he was and where he had worked. He was a devout Catholic, as was McCarthy, and I thought their ties came through the church.
I told McCarthy I knew McCoy had been in the CIA, and the senator said, more or less, so what? Lots of good people had joined the Agency after World War II in hopes of turning back communism and making the world a safer place. I had read enough to know that McCarthy’s political party, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, was socially liberal—in favor of unions and state support of railroads and utilities—as well as being hostile to international communism. The senator then volunteered—I did not ask—that he had done favors involving the CIA for President Kennedy. McCarthy had said little to me about Jack Kennedy, but he could be vicious in private about Bobby, telling me and others that he was brighter and a better Catholic than Bobby and then adding that his dog was a lot brighter than Bruno, the high-profile Kennedy family dog. McCarthy went on: He had done some secret missions for President Kennedy, including making visits to Catholic leaders in Latin America—he specifically mentioned Chile—that included the delivery to a prominent anticommunist political leader there of a briefcase filled with fifty thousand dollars in CIA funds. The money, and its delivery, were handled by Jerry Eller. Afterward, McCarthy said, with what I took to be pride, that he would never visit the President in the White House to debrief him, but would meet anywhere else.
I was more than a little troubled by all of this: He had abetted Jack Kennedy in an abuse of presidential power whose continuing abuse in Vietnam, half a decade later, was a major element of his campaign against Lyndon Johnson. I guess, flattered as I was by his trust in me, I applauded him for his change of heart and did not think then and do not believe today that the CIA was in any way running his campaign, nor did it have anything to do with his decision to challenge Lyndon Johnson. But I knew that the CIA was deeply immersed in the killing and maiming that was going on in Vietnam, and thought that there was a hell of a lot about the Agency that needed to be made public—just not during the campaign. (I had already met, through McCarthy, a few other insiders who would be of enormous help to my reporting on the CIA in future years.) I never told McCarthy what I thought of the CIA; in fact, we did not discuss the CIA again.
Our goal was to get rid of Johnson and end the Vietnam War, and we were still floundering by the end of January. We got a huge boost one night in remote Berlin, New Hampshire, after a long day, when I answered the door of my motel room and found Richard Goodwin standing in the cold. There had been rumors in the press that Goodwin, a veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who was famed for speeches on civil rights he had written for both presidents, had been disappointed by Bobby Kennedy’s refusal to run for the presidency and was thinking of joining our campaign. And here he was, in a run-down motel at a pretty much useless campaign stop. Dick later would tell a different version of our first chat, but I remember his words as well as any I heard from Arnold Dornfeld at the City News Bureau. He walked into my room carrying an electric typewriter, dramatically dropped it on a bed, and said, “You and me and this typewriter, kid, are going to overthrow a president.” Goodwin, a Jack Kennedy whiz kid, a guy who finished at the top of his Harvard Law School class and edited the law review there, was volunteering his services to our ragtag campaign. Dick and I bickered a lot; I was jealous of him because McCarthy delighted in talking to someone who was a grown-up and knew the score. How tiresome it had to be for McCarthy to put up with political novices like me whose sole purpose for being in the campaign and working as hard as we were was not, at the core, as I said earlier, about him, or his political success, but to stop a war. That was also Dick’s motive. I liked and admired Dick—we eventually shared a suite in the Manchester hotel that was the New Hampshire campaign headquarters—but I quickly tired of picking up the private telephone we both used and hearing Teddy Kennedy ask to speak to Dick. Kennedy called so often he eventually began calling me Sy. It was obvious that if McCarthy did well against the President in New Hampshire, Bobby would enter the race, and it would be bye-bye McCarthy. Goodwin knew everything there was to know about our poll numbers and the campaign funds we did or did not have, and I was convinced he was sharing that information. So one anxious morning I woke up McCarthy earlier than he wanted—not a good idea—and told him what I thought Goodwin was up to. McCarthy, ever droll, even in pajamas, gave me a sly look and said, “Well, I don’t know, Sy. It’s kind of good to have a traitor around. Keeps you on your toes.” That was that. I was again nonplussed. Did the guy want to be president? If not, what was I doing?
A major turning point came on the last day of January when the North Vietnamese army and its allies in the South, known as the Vietcong, began a well-planned and very violent series of armed attacks during the Tet holidays, at a time when a cease-fire supposedly was in place. Over the next two weeks, Americans watched in dismay and horror as South Vietnamese bases and cities fell and the U.S. embassy in Saigon was nearly overrun. It was suddenly clear to many that the war in Vietnam could not be won. Untold numbers of college students began rallying in ever greater numbers for Gene, throughout New Hampshire as well as across the nation. Our poll numbers began rising—faster and more intensely than the campaign chose to make public. My press office was suddenly besieged with requests for interviews and TV appearances. We all began thinking ahead, to the next major primary, in Wisconsin, where McCarthy, a Minnesotan, was far better known.
The campaign continued to be starved for cash, but there was money to be had in Wisconsin. One night a jet was chartered—I had no idea who paid for it—and McCarthy and I flew to a private fund-raiser that had been set up in Milwaukee. We were told that a number of wealthy antiwar businessmen, many of them Jewish, were eager to meet the senator. Also on the flight was Harry Kelly, an AP pal of mine, who was doing a major story on the New Hampshire race. Kelly was bright and a charmer, and he and McCarthy had a terrific time gossiping about books, movies, and the vagaries of various senators—anything but the campaign. I wasn’t happy but what the hell. If McCarthy had fun with Harry, it might make it easier for me to get him to spend time with other reporters.
We landed in Milwaukee just in time to get to the fund-raiser, which was scheduled for 8:00 p.m. As we drove into the city, we passed an art house movie theater that was showing a newly released British film version of Ulysses, the famed James Joyce novel. McCarthy insisted that our taxi turn around and then ordered me to go to the box office and find out when the next showing would begin. Gripped with dread, I reported back that it would start in the next few minutes. “Let’s go, Harry,” McCarthy said. “I understand they use the word ‘fuck’ in the movie.” What the fuck, I thought, and asked McCarthy as he climbed out of the taxi what on earth I should tell the men with checks at the fund-raiser. He laughed and said, “Tell them I’ll part the waters.” He and Harry then walked into the theater.
The fund-raiser was a disaster. I mumbled something about the senator taking ill, and gave a short speech to a lot of insulted rich men. We didn’t raise enough cash to pay for the charter—if we had to pay. I was embarrassed by my lame performance but found it difficult to beg for contributions when I was not sure that the money would be well spent. I decided then that I would never write about the campaign—and have not until this memoir. I was convinced McCarthy was showing off for Harry, and I was crushed by his cavalier attitude toward the fund-raising that was vital to his chances of winning the Democratic nomination, and the presidency. We would not do well in New Hampshire if we could not match the Johnson campaign in terms of money raised. The President’s campaign, taking no chances, was beginning to spend more and more on television and radio advertisements.
There were other difficulties. We were getting much more media coverage, and I was constantly finding myself having to explain away the senator’s penchant for dropping a tough paragraph from a speech that had been distributed in advance. One particularly painful instance involved a gutsy commitment by him to explicitly call for a guaranteed annual income for all Americans, an idea the bright kids on my staff had extensively researched. Stephen Cohen, who dropped out of Amherst College to work in the press operation, produced some terrific data, and when I asked where he got it, he said it came from a telephone chat he had with Wilbur Cohen, who was secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Johnson administration. This was very interesting. Stephen somehow got Cohen’s unlisted home telephone number and called him one night, identifying himself as a McCarthy volunteer, and got the cabinet secretary to fill in the blank spots in our proposal. Such antics were not unusual among Oates’s volunteers. Nancy Lipton, who was a reliable typist of the early morning speech drafts I wrote for the senator, once pulled me out of the shower to complain about sloppy language and comma faults in the text. Nancy was Mary McCarthy’s roommate at Radcliffe and, like Steve Cohen, became a successful academic. The ever-competent Steve became more and more essential to me and Marylouise Oates, and often traveled with us. There was a late night when the three of us, exhausted as usual, found ourselves with one room reserved, instead of three, in a seedy motel somewhere in New Hampshire. We shared the bed, fully clothed.
I should have told the senator about Wilbur Cohen’s involvement; it might have made him hesitate before deleting mention of a guaranteed annual income in the speech he delivered. His edit came an hour or so after I had assured a busload of skeptical political reporters that he would indeed say what was in the advance text. The reporters duly filed stories for their newspapers’ early editions. They were enraged, as they had every right to be. I took the heat for that, lamely explaining that I had misunderstood the senator’s wishes. When McCarthy had finished his speech, he walked past me off the stage and, knowing that he had undercut me, asked me how I liked it. I said, “D minus.” When I got to the hotel bar that night, a number of newspaper guys warned me that McCarthy was on the warpath toward me and, once again, my job was in danger. I wanted to say so was his insurgency, but did not.
I also kept my mouth shut about the senator’s disdainful attitude toward fund-raising, as well as his amusement at Dick Goodwin’s continued private chats with the Kennedys. I would complain like hell to my staff and others, including Paul Newman and Cal Lowell, about the senator, but such was merely the other side of respect, or love, as those who worked with me understood. I confess to also being vocal about my distress at McCarthy’s complaints about the volunteers who were rallying more and more to his campaign, and kept on nagging the senator to spend more time at volunteer functions. He continued to resist doing so, on the ground that the students who dropped out of college to knock on doors were not doing so for him but using the campaign to express their anger over the Vietnam War. It was demoralizing to hear such talk.
A far less important nuisance was the venom and paranoia that was constantly being injected into the campaign by Abigail McCarthy. She had called me early in the campaign to object to a photograph of her daughter that appeared in a campaign handout. Was she kidding? I told her that I was not her press secretary but her husband’s. Bad mistake. Once on her enemies list, one stayed on it forever. Her power came from the fact that her husband was as frightened of her as was his Senate staff of him. She and the senator would separate the next year. The path to power in the campaign, as two of McCarthy’s largest contributors quickly learned, was through Abigail. She also intimidated Curtis Gans, who ran the campaign’s political operation and was always having staff meetings that I refused to attend. I saw Gans and his gaggle of aides as typical politicians who would trade principles for votes. I also felt they worried far more about a future role in the campaign and in a McCarthy White House than about the issue that grabbed me and my aides—stopping the war. I had lobbied early in the campaign for the irascible, iconoclastic, and brilliant Harold Ickes to be put in charge of the New Hampshire campaign. It did not happen, so I understood, because Ickes wanted full control and Gans and Blair Clark would not give it up. I always had time for Ickes, who would flit in and out of New Hampshire, because he delighted in mocking me, cheerfully, and would invariably greet me by saying, in a singsong voice, “Chicken Little is here and the sky is falling, falling, falling.” He had it right: I took everything to heart, and he did not feel the need to go behind my back to say so.
McCarthy’s impatience with his wife came through most vividly one night in Boston. My office had produced a twelve-page campaign brochure full of position papers and the obligatory handsome photographs of a happy McCarthy family that was to be distributed in Sunday newspapers throughout New Hampshire on the last weekend of the campaign. A final proof was rushed from our union print shop in New York to our hotel late at night, and McCarthy and I looked it over before giving the go-ahead to start the presses. The press run was in the hundreds of thousands. I was dragged out of bed hours later by the senator and told to rush to his suite. Abigail, it turned out, had gotten a proof flown to their home in Washington, and she was upset about some of the photographs and language. It had something to do with angering potential Catholic voters or some such. The senator, in his bathrobe, got her on the phone and told her that he had me—the archenemy—sitting in front of him. He then repeated her complaints—she was listening—and told me in a very stern voice that I had to make the changes she wanted. Yes, sir, I said. The alternative was to say, are you nuts? The brochure was being printed as we talked. McCarthy asked Abigail if she was satisfied. She was, I gathered, and he hung up. He rose from his chair, shrugged, gave me a warm smile, and told me he would see me in the morning. It was as close to intimacy as we’d come. He knew he had thrown me to the wolves—that is, his wife—with his cowardly performance and I would suffer the consequences. Abigail, as predicted, told her moneymen that I had deliberately defied her husband. The senator had given me, his press secretary, an order, and I, in Abigail’s world, had just lied to his face.
McCarthy stunned America by winning 42 percent of the vote in the March 12 New Hampshire election. Johnson, despite picking up 48 percent of the Democratic vote as a write-in candidate, had to know then that it was over, but he waited almost three weeks, until March 31, to announce that he would not stand for reelection. Bobby Kennedy jumped into the race, and Dick Goodwin left our campaign to join his. Bobby was going to be just as strident about the war as was McCarthy, and I was thinking more and more about going back to what I was good at—being a reporter. My tiny travel staff back in Washington, led by a tireless Joshua Leinsdorf, was now chartering two American Airlines planes, with crews, to fly the senator, our burgeoning staff, and scores of domestic and international reporters from campaign stop to campaign stop. The reporters had to be billed daily for the flights. Lowell had taken time off from the campaign, as had Newman and Ryan. And I was now running a travel agency. Was I really a politician?
There was a chilling moment in Milwaukee that convinced me that McCarthy, with Bobby in the race, felt trapped in a campaign that was no longer viable. The Democratic nomination was still in sight, but there was a lot of political hardball to play. If Irish Catholic McCarthy wanted to win the nomination, he had to deal with Irish Catholic mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. Daley controlled the Illinois delegation to the Democratic convention and was known to be partial to the Kennedys. I had written extensively about police corruption and racism while working for the AP in Chicago and had contempt for the mayor. But I was told by one of our people—I do not remember who—that Daley would be delighted to take a call from McCarthy. I was given a private phone number to call and a time window. My ambivalence about Daley did not matter; it had to be done. I found McCarthy at lunch with the usual gaggle, including the now-returned Lowell, Mary McGrory, and two of the big money boys. I crouched next to him, waiting for a moment to whisper my message, but McCarthy ignored me. I finally interrupted him and, very quietly, gave him the message. McCarthy, as mean as I’d ever seen him, loudly announced to all that Sy Hersh was here and “wants me to kiss Mayor Daley’s ass.” He did not make the call.
A few days later, I learned that McCarthy had agreed with Curtis Gans that he would attract a much higher percentage of the white vote in Wisconsin if he canceled a series of already scheduled campaign rallies in the black neighborhoods of Milwaukee. Race was always a complicated issue for McCarthy. He was in no way a racist or a bigot and had been adamant, magnificently so, in his public criticism of the Pentagon’s decision in 1966 to lower the standards for enlistment in the armed forces—a move, pushed by Robert McNamara, that resulted in a higher percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the front lines of the Vietnam War. The Johnson administration was “changing the color of the corpses” in the war, McCarthy said again and again in his speeches, as it tried to limit the number of middle-class whites in combat and tamp down the growing antiwar movement. But the senator, in a basic way, did not understand the extent of institutionalized white racism in America. He just could not relate to the anger of black America. Early in the campaign, a young black labor leader from Detroit named John Conyers, who went on to have a long career in Congress, arranged an off-the-record meeting for McCarthy with a number of black civic and union officials. It was a disaster. McCarthy talked about how he had once had a Negro roommate while in a parochial school. I subsequently wrote him a long memo about racism, making the point that he did not have to believe that institutionalized white racism existed; he just had to recognize that an overwhelming number of blacks believed it did. Mary McCarthy, who understood her father in ways many did not, made sure he read it.
This history, along with a lack of respect and distrust for Gans, made Marylouise Oates, and me, and most of my staff, frantic upon hearing that the senator had agreed to cancel appearances in the black community. I couldn’t believe McCarthy had signed off on such a dumb move, and I raced to his hotel suite. I almost came to blows with a young man who was then serving as a bodyguard when McCarthy came out. I told him what I had learned and asked if it were so. He told me, very coldly, that it was none of my business. That was it. He was running for the presidency now, and for him moral issues, so I believed, were secondary to getting votes. The Democrats of America had made a statement about the Vietnam War and I had done my part. I left the campaign the next afternoon, along with Oates. We had gone through three months together, protecting each other’s back and convinced there was nothing more important than what we were doing, despite the madness.
One of Oates’s confidants chose to tell a New York Times reporter what had gone on, and our resignations became a two- or three-day television news wonder. Oates would remind me years later that our rumored resignations became official when we literally jumped off a campaign bus before a rally at Stevens Point, Wisconsin. As we fled down the street, with a few reporters following us, we spotted Robert Lowell sitting in the grass, waiting for the McCarthy caravan. As I loped by, Oates said, I yelled, joyously, “Good-bye, Cal Lowell. Good-bye, Poet Laureate.”
I flew home, said hello to my family, and went to sleep. I answered no telephone calls and gave no interviews and kept my experience in national politics to myself. I had helped get rid of a president, but not a war. I had a book being published in a few weeks and lots of ideas for magazine assignments and wanted to put national politics behind me.
McCarthy called me a few weeks after the blowup. There was no apology sought, or needed. Instead, he wanted to know if I would return to the campaign to help with speeches and position papers. I told him I was not sure. He said I would get a call to continue the dialogue, but I did not. I had no more formal contact with the campaign, which stayed alive through the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the violent and chaotic Democratic convention that nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey in Chicago. McCarthy would have been a far better choice.
There was one last hurrah late in the summer when I was asked by Adam Walinsky, who had been one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides, if I would call McCarthy and find out if he would agree to a meeting to discuss a fourth party—Governor George Wallace of Alabama also was a presidential candidate in 1968—whose goal would be to deny the election to either Humphrey or Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate. The senator said yes, and Walinsky and I and a few others, Kennedy people, went to his home. McCarthy told us he thought he could win as many as four states if on the ballot—Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, and California—enough to throw the election to Wallace. I was pretty sure he was putting us on.
There would be no fourth party. Nixon won the election that November and continued the war, as Humphrey would have. McCarthy began a slow drift away from the political mainstream. He formally separated from Abigail in 1969, but their marriage, as many in the campaign knew, had ended long before. There would be no divorce. McCarthy announced in 1970 that he would not be a candidate for reelection to the Senate but, whimsically, so it seemed, staged two halfhearted presidential primary campaigns in 1972 and 1976 in which he performed very poorly. There was a final, doomed campaign in 1982 when he ran in the primary for the Senate seat in Minnesota he had abandoned eleven years earlier. He got 24 percent of the vote.
My wife and I stayed in touch with the senator and made it a point to visit with him, usually over dinner, until he passed away in 2005. We talked very little about the past. His wonderful daughter Mary went on to law school and taught at Yale Law School. She died tragically young, from cancer, in 1990.
*I made it a point to seek out foreign diplomats who had served in Russia, China, or North Vietnam before being assigned to Washington. I became especially friendly a decade later with the Indian ambassador, K. R. Narayanan, who had studied political science after World War II with Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. He joined the Indian foreign service and served in China, Russia, Turkey, and England before coming to Washington. Narayanan, with whom I took many long walks, was elected President of India in 1997, and I had the fun of visiting with him in late 2001 at his official residence, the Viceroy’s House, a 200,000-square-foot edifice built by Lord Mountbatten. The modest Narayanan told me he utilized only a few rooms there.